Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, author, filmmaker and front man for the band Climate Change.
The shift in awareness is very encouraging and seems quite likely to be more or less permanent because the number of unprecedented weather events will very likely continue to increase. First published on the Rag Blog Part 1 of a three part series: Part 1: The Climate Awareness Drought is Over: Time to Change the Tone…
Five degrees of change—a half zone. Not average temperature; this is based on the average last freeze. I gave a presentation to the Austin Organic Garden Society last month and I remembered USDA had recently come out with new hardiness zone maps. The USDA changes in 2012 are not so much different than the 2006…
More Evidence of West Antarctic Ice Sheet Disintegration from the Jackson School of Geosciences in Austin The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is the only “marine ice sheet” remaining on Earth. A “marine” ice sheet is one that whose base rests on rock below sea level. These peculiar ice sheets were numerous during ice ages…
Across the northern hemisphere, extreme heat that once happened across 0.1 to 0.2 percent of the Northern Hemisphere now happens across ten percent–every year. The most extreme events are happening nearly 5,000 times more often than normal. April 14, 2012: In Just the Last 30 Years, Climate Extremes Have Increased 10 to 100 Times— Dr….
In the twelve months prior to April 16, high temperature records outnumbered low temperature records 3 to 1. James Hansen told the U.S. Senate in 1988 that “it is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.” After all of the recent unprecedented…
What was previously thought to be the threshold or complete melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet was an average global warming of 3.4 to 9.2 degrees F has now been refined to 1.4 to 5.8 degrees F. this is roughly half the warming that we previously understood. What was previously thought to be the threshold…
It is not because of increased population and it is not because of increased observation. Think that our growing population is enduring increasing impacts from severe weather and you would be correct. But adjusting extreme weather events for what the scientists call “population bias” is nothing new. What is new is the amount of…
How Many Unprecedented Historic Weather Records Have to be Broken for Climate Change to Get Some Respect? The Science of Early Spring So far in 2012 in Austin we have had bout the same amount of rain than we did in the 12-month period that marked the drought that peaked last summer (the deepest 12-month…
Reposted from NSF Press Release: http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=123520&org=NSF&from=home Early snowmelt caused by climate change in the Colorado Rocky Mountains snowballs into two chains of events: a decrease in the number of flowers, which, in turn, decreases available nectar. The result is decline in a population of the Mormon Fritillary butterfly, Speyeria mormonia. Using long-term data on date…
March 21, 2012: — Henry David Thoreau, Concord Massechusetts, Walden Pond. Among temperature and non temperature dependent flowering species, climate change has affected and will likely continue to shape the pattern of species loss in Thoreau’s woods. Species that have decreased greatly in abundance include anemones, buttercups, asters, campanulas, bluets, bladderworts, dogwoods, lilies, mints, orchids,…
If sea level rises just three feet, 1.5 million housing units will be flooded and 3.7 million people displaced. Pick an amount of sea level increase, any old amount will do. The minimum is the IPCC estimate of about 15 inches (a half meter). This of course does not include any increase in discharge from…
In a paper in Climatic Change, Researchers from Drexler University, the University of Montreal and Ohio State have found that politics and economics (unemployment) are the most important things that shape our thoughts about climate change. When the economy is tight and or when our politicians are actively advocating for or against climate change science,…
March 3, 2012: — How many more people will have to die in these unprecedented outbreaks before the delayers get it? It’s hard to say. By all (media) accounts, these outbreaks are not as bad as in the past. We have inflation and more people to increase the chance of damage and death. The D&D…
(This article is an expansion of and provides technical backup for Bruce Melton’s three-part series, “Welcome to Climate Change in Texas,” published in December 2011 and January 2012 on The Rag Blog.) Read More — Extra: Welcome to Climate Change Texas: The Worst-Case Scenario is Happening (expansion and backup) Part…
The UAH temperature record is touted by the D&D crowd as being proof that global temperature is not rising. This paper corrects some fundamental issues with the UAH dataset. Here’s the latest scientific explanation of global temperature and why there is contention on how much it has warmed. The data below represents the consensus post…
January 29, 2012, The Wall Street Journal “No Need to Panic About Global Warming” Sixteen Deniers Authorities Delegate Delay – These 16 “scientists,” as the Wall Street Journal calls them, have published a letter that has some news for the readers of the WSJ. They tell us that our planet has not warmed for well…
The Texas Forest Service tells us that a half billion trees have died. The first of this series of droughts in 2005/6 was just classified as extreme. The last two have been one category worse than extreme — the exceptional category. The last 12 months were drier than the worst 12 months of the great…
As I have been saying in the first two installments of this series, climate change is already much more extreme than most scientists have been predicting. This is mainly because the majority of predictions are based on the “most likely” emissions scenario and because we have not reduced our emissions like climate scientists told us…
Environmental activist Bruce Melton discusses the real-world effects of climate change on Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer. Listen to it here: http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/rag-radio-bruce-melton-on-real-world.html
Happy New Year! I take no responsibility in reporting the following (Ha-Ha-ha-ha): How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a light bulb? None – There is no known evidence that light bulbs burn out. Ha-Ha-ha-ha! How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a light bulb? None – The human…
